Episode 8: Do you need to mulch with woodchips forever?

One of the most effective initial ways to cover, build, and protect your soil is to blanket new garden areas with a deep layer of wood chip mulch.  As they decompose, the mulch builds organic matter and increases the soil biology, resulting in healthier plants and more abundant fruit.

Although there are many benefits for a land steward when we choose to continue the wood chipping process, it's not a blanket scenario that needs to happen indefinitely.

So, if you are wondering how long you need to keep mulching the food forest or garden... the answers here might surprise you.   This episode covers practical ways you can wean off wood chips and find other creative ways to keep your soil covered and microbiology protected.

Link to the food forest designer website! 
https://permaculturefx.com/how-to-plant-a-food-forest-part-4-installing/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

And welcome to the Obsess with Plants podcast. I'm David. I'm Obsessed with Plants with my co-host here. My name is Chris. I go by Permaculture FX Online. And uh today I'm drinking out of my grandfather's coffee mug. He used to work at uh superfoods, he was like a trucker, he passed away this last year. Um so this is my sentimental um coffee mug. Your coffee mug is from the mind of the leaf. He's an awesome potter out of humansville, Missouri, actually, and he does all this cool custom pottery goodness. That one I had him do three for me that I wanted to look like the Hobbit, you know, because you know, slight obsession.

SPEAKER_01 0:37

Slight obsession. Slight obsession. It's super hot, so I'm gonna have to read on that for a while.

SPEAKER_00 0:41

Well, today, fun topic. You know, you and I have done a lot of uh installs together. We've done a lot of food forests together. And one of the top questions, at least that I get, and I know you've heard a lot of times from clients, from friends, from new food foresters, is hey, do I have to wood chip forever? Or is there ever gonna be a time when I can stop wood chipping? And I I guarantee you people are listening to this going, oh yeah, I have been asking the same question. Wood chipping is hard.

SPEAKER_01 1:10

It's a lot of work. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of work. Any anytime I'm wood chipping, it's like a two-day process with like equipment too. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:17

And there's I mean, there's strategies to like make it less, but man, it's a lot of work. It's a lot of work. But I think at the end of the day, the benefits outweigh the workload and the back ache afterwards. I mean, I'm 44 years old and I I feel it in the lower back.

SPEAKER_01 1:32

Well, the the way the way I look at it is okay, well, which do I want to, you know, be doing? Hurting my back uh occasionally with a wheelbarrow of mulch, or do I want to hurt my back bending over pulling weeds? 100%. 100%, 100%. I hate weeding. Weeding's awful. I hate it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:48

Some people think weed is like, oh, it's in my zen. Like my mom, amazing weeder. So her thing is like she'll have her tea in the morning and she has these fancy little like Martha Stewart baskets that she carries around. And every morning in her prayer time and Devo time, she'll carry the basket around and she fills up the basket just one time with weeds, and she does a little bit every day. She's so disciplined, like so disciplined. I did not get that gift. I am not that disciplined to weed every single day. I just can't, you know.

SPEAKER_01 2:18

I I can't either. My grandmother just fills up her golf cart with weeds every two weeks or something like that. She'll just fill the whole bed up and then I'm like, that's like an all-day thing.

SPEAKER_00 2:29

Yeah. No, I I can't. I mean, I love my audiobooks. I love listening to podcasts when I'm outside, but weeding, I I ain't doing that much. And in Florida, you get them stupid kamikaze fire ants that you sit down and all of a sudden it's like 50 of them bite you at once. They all have this coordinated attack. It's crazy. Yeah, it's just crazy.

SPEAKER_01 2:48

You can't like you can't stand still in a spot for and then you know, God forbid, you don't have gloves on. Oh my god, then your hands just itch and ache all day. Oh, it's bad. It's bad.

SPEAKER_00 2:58

But I think when we understand the why behind the wood chipping, and not just because a food forest person told you so, it begins to make a little more sense of like, okay, I see why this is actually happening. You know, and when we step back outside of our yard, it makes way more sense. It doesn't make as much sense when you're looking at a suburban yard or an urban yard going, oh, there's grass, and now my pretty wood-chipped area. We don't, we don't realize the reasoning behind it is we're actually there to mimic nature.

SPEAKER_01 3:29

Well, and I I feel like that that image is easy to kind of lose nowadays because a lot of times we mulch for aesthetics, not for function. And you don't, you're not, I mean, mulching isn't for aesthetics, although we've gotten used to the the pretty aesthetic of mulch. That's not why we mulch. 100%. It's nothing to do with visuals.

SPEAKER_00 3:48

Oh no, no, it's it's we are mimicking nature. You know, when you think about the woods, the woods in nature is cycling nutrients literally all the time. Like every single day, a branch is falling, leaves are falling, you know, animals are in there scratching, trampling down, trampling, they're uh cycling the nutrients again and again and again. So the woods are doing it naturally. Now, in our yards, it it's not the woods, so we have to find a new way to mimic nature because you'll have trees be falling in your backyard too.

SPEAKER_01 4:19

So I mean you gotta you gotta you gotta provide the same function while also getting the backyard.

SPEAKER_00 4:24

In most backyards, they're slightly different than the woods. Yeah, the look is different, the function is different, you know.

SPEAKER_01 4:30

Well, at the end of the day, your garden needs to be accessible to you. I mean, it's not a garden at that point, that's just you know, wilds. Oh, totally. Oh, totally. But you want to enjoy it and get to it.

SPEAKER_00 4:40

Yeah, and a lot of people have, you know, the wilder areas of the yard, they have the neater areas of the yard. And I think for me personally, when I lived in suburbia in Kansas City, I love a yard that's like a mullet. I want business in the front and a party in the back. You know what I mean? Like I want, I want there to be nice, neat wood chips, repeating lines, a formal design, you know.

SPEAKER_01 5:03

Aesthetically pleasing.

SPEAKER_00 5:04

Yes. When it's out front, when it's in the side yard. Even for me, like my backyard around the back patio and around my deck. Like in Kansas City, my deck looked down and everything was was neat. There were more repeating patterns. As you go out back farther, it's a little more wild, a little more.

SPEAKER_01 5:22

Well, and you need it approachable to other people too. So you want you, you want to you want to encourage people to get into gardening. And when they see your you know, section where it's you know wildflowers and stuff, but they're all out of season and it just looks like weeds, and they're like, that doesn't look very good.

SPEAKER_00 5:38

And it's like, well, you know, and then you know, it's you mean you want to get along with your neighbors, really, is what is what we're saying. Like, we want our neighbors to appreciate us and like us. I have these friends that live in Ocala that we were just at a couple weeks ago, the horse farm, and Jen and David are the total opposites. They have the Royal Grounds Horse Farm, a beautiful equestrian farm doing permaculture design uh royalgroundsfarm.com if you guys are you know wanting to look into it. And they're doing like the equine thing with the permaculture thing in mind. Now, Jen and her daughter, well, the whole family, they love the Lord of the Rings. So Jen wants her food forest to look like the Shire. She wants wildflowers. David is an incredible architect, like award-winning architect based out of Texas, and he wants formal design. He wants straight lines, wood chips. His olive orchard is absolutely stunning, you know, and so it's like it has like a an edge, you know, an edge and a border.

SPEAKER_01 6:38

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 6:39

So they on their farm, they've done well with they get both hands. And I think we can still have that in a suburban backyard or an urban backyard, um, and still respect our neighbors or our spouse and have those different elements of design. And wood chips do help us be able to do that, I feel like. You know, absolutely now. Let's talk about a little bit that there are many different types of wood chips. Because I feel like when people say mulch or people say wood chips, the stereotype is the bark chips. You know what I mean? So talk a little bit about bark chips. Why do people do that, first of all?

SPEAKER_01 7:15

I mean, it it just comes down back down to that aesthetic mulching versus non-aesthetic. Bark's gonna last a heck of a lot longer, it's slower to break down than you know, the wood, the twigs, the leaves, all that stuff. So that's generally what you see in like the the uniform shape, uniform size. For the most part, yeah, you're getting even chunks and all that stuff, or you know, it's painted or you know, so on and so forth. Oh, don't get me starting. The the dye is in it.

SPEAKER_00 7:39

Why people dye their wood chips makes me crazy. And so, but I will say the nice thing about the uh bark mulch is that it's the same size, same shape, same color, decomposes at the same time, but that decomposition at the same time can also be a drawback. So, versus something like ramified wood chips, which you have big chips, you have little chips, you have leaves, you have sticks. It's what you'd get from a tree company or at a box store. It's like the Cypress no float or whatever. Those are decomposing at different rates, the different sizes and shapes, because there's a different carbon content, or there's leaves or sticks that have nitrogen in it, those are gonna create different fungal networks, different bacterial networks. And so you're getting more bang for your buck in the soil, but it's not the same look as if you're doing bark mulch, you know.

SPEAKER_01 8:32

And and I mean, you you if you absolutely have to have the aesthetic, I mean you could do both. You could do a nice layer of the, you know, ramified where you have all the leaves and that stuff, and then put a layer of more aesthetic bark on top. I mean, you can you can do both. Um, but I would say the downside of having it even is that because it's all decomposing at the exact same rate, it's not, you know, it mulch when it breaks down, it takes up a little bit and then gives back even more. And if it's all the same size, well, it's taking up everything at the exact same time, evenly. Locking it down even. And some yeah, in some cases, you can have it times where it just sucks everything up. And if it doesn't break down fast enough, it just takes and doesn't give back. Yeah. I think with like if you see in like developments nowadays, especially like around publics and stuff like that, they put those even bark chips and they plant these trees and these little islands between all the asphalt. Well, the sand that they planted in isn't nutrient nutrient dense, and then they throw this little bark chip stuff on top. Well, then any nutrients that was there as little as there probably was re-tied up, it's yeah, immediately soaked up and then yeah, then it's dry. It doesn't, it doesn't hold in moisture. And I mean, honestly, that's that's kind of where uh you'd want to mulch, in my opinion, is you got nutrients secondary holding in moisture, holding in moisture.

SPEAKER_00 9:46

That's and you did talk a little bit a second ago about the strategy of mulching. And I had there's a friend of mine living the bohemian dream on um Instagram, and her and I have this ongoing joke, like in the food forest, is we like to do our chop and drop, but kind of hide it. And so, like when and she lives in a very suburban area down south, South Florida, and so she'll go kind of behind the food forest, lay down the chop and drop, and then bury it with the mulch so it looks neat and clean and wonderful. And she gets the benefit of the chop and drop, but we both like to cover it up with some wood chips or some mulch to keep it clean.

SPEAKER_01 10:20

Well, and depending on how you're chopping dropping it, why you're chop and dropping, you may want to smother it. I mean, it it is a very real thing that as it breaks down, some of that nutrient does go into the atmosphere instead of the soil. So smothering it can be good as long as it's not something that's gonna sprout and grow.

SPEAKER_00 10:34

Oh, totally. And like you're saying, like it gives you different types of the bacteria, different types of little micro pockets for soil biology to be in. And those wood chips also, as they decompose, they give um phosphorus back to the soil through the mycorrhizal fungi. So for people that don't understand mycorrhizal fungi, it's this cool network of fungi that goes through the soil and essentially it extends using a sugar exchange, it extends the root system of the plant. So normally, if your root system is only right here, if you've got enough mycorrhizal fungi, it extends the plant's ability to uptake nutrients and it can actually connect trees. There's a communication network that takes place between the trees that can only happen with mycorrhizal fungi. So if tree number one right here gets sick and there's enough mycorrhizal fungi, when it gets sick, it can send a message and phytonutrients to another tree and go, hey, I just got sick, I got attacked. Here's some antibodies, and it boosts those antibodies for another tree. So that mycorrhizal fungi creates this network of communication, of health, the uptake in phosphorus and nutrients. And so it doesn't just give back, you know, a little bit of organic matter. We're getting literal nutrients and microbes and bacteria for the soil as that decomposes. And that really only happens with ramified wood chips.

SPEAKER_01 12:00

Well, it also holds in moisture a lot longer, too. Yep. I mean, I mean, mulch is already like a sponge, but when you have the fungi in there too, it really just maximizes, it creates void spaces as it's breaking through the wood chips. Yeah. And it just holds it in, locks it in. Not that it's preventing it from being accessed by the plants, but it really does prevent it from just wicking straight into the soil or just washing away.

SPEAKER_00 12:22

Controversial opinion is that I don't hardly ever water a food forest once it's established. The only reason I would do that is if we are in severe drought, if it's crazy drought, I pull back my wood chips and stick my finger in. We had a pretty good drought a couple years ago that was, you know, very dry, very hot in the summer, and everybody's watering their food forest. It's on it twice a week or once a day or whatever it is. And I'm going, I pull back my wood chips, I stick my hand in and it's still moist. But the key with wood chips is going deep. You know, people only go one or two inches deep and they think it's enough. You gotta go six or eight inches deep on it because that's what retains the moisture, the microbes, the bacteria, the mycorrhizal fungi. If you don't have moisture in your soil because the wood chips are deep enough, the microbes die. The mycorrhizal fungi really struggles or it goes dormant. So having that depth is key. If you want the benefits, you gotta go deep, or it's not gonna give you back what you want it to.

SPEAKER_01 13:20

And in a lot of places in nature, you won't see wood chips that dense, but you have a dense canopy. So even though it's not all on the ground protecting it, you have this multi-stage layer of leaves and then branches and you know, preventing sunlight from hitting it. So even though the mulch may be thinner in the wood in like in the woods and stuff, you still have that multiple layers. But if you're out, you know, out in the yard, it's you know, it's just some single row of fruit trees along your back fence and the sun's hitting it brutally. So you're kind of having to make up for the fact that you don't have a dense forest, yeah. And you know, you have this ton of ex you know, exposure. Yeah, you need that extra.

SPEAKER_00 13:55

And practically for people that are in that suburban backyard that you're talking about that have the sun exposure. Basically, when you buy a bag of mulch, the footprint of that bag when you lay it down, that's about how deep your wood chips are gonna be. You know, that whatever that size bag is, a couple cubic feet. That's literally how how deep it's gonna be. You want six or eight inches deep. Now, my buddy Jonathan, it's so funny because he is very frugal on everything. I mean, he is like, let's use the the exact right amount possible. I'm I'm an excessive person. I go 110% in. And finally, a couple years ago, I got him to admit, all right, the six or eight wood chips really does make a difference. Because it takes proving to people that the depth of the wood chips matters, you know, and and it that's what really makes the biggest difference. But again, let's go back to the problem at hand.

SPEAKER_01 14:47

That's a lot of mulch.

SPEAKER_00 14:48

It's a lot of mulch and it's a lot of work. However, as time goes on, your soil is gonna eat it up slower. So when you first, for example, start doing wood chips, your soil's depleted. You're probably putting it on a subdivision or soil that's been brought in or sand that's contractor sand, and it wants the biomass, it wants the organic matter, it's eating it up super, super fast. As time goes on, it decomposes slower. So when I first moved to Florida, the first couple times I was doing wood chips, I mean, about every eight or 10 months I'd have to refresh my wood chips, and that's a lot of work. Well, after a year, two years, three years, now I can go 18 months or two years before I have to refresh the wood chips because the soil has reached that saturation point where it doesn't have to eat it up quite as much. But to get it to that point does take attention, it takes cycling nutrients, it's worth it, but you gotta get to that point to where you see the bang for the buck.

SPEAKER_01 15:49

And we've talked about in previous episodes of like installing food for us, the pendulum swinging. You have that, you know, at early stage of you'll have a violent swing of no life to a ton of life, and then back and forth. And then that's kind of what you're gonna get with that initial, you know, burst of mulch is that suddenly there's now a new space for all this life to go. Yeah. Well, everything's gonna immediately explode, maximize their production, and all that stuff.

SPEAKER_00 16:12

And practically there's a couple ways, and we'll get into you know why people want to stop in a second. But in the in this process of I'm applying wood chips, I'm applying wood chips, I'm trying to get to that point in the pendulum swing, you know, people can order it by bags. It's usually cheapest to get it by the palette. You can buy it from a company like Reliable Pete in Okahumka is really good. Um, and you know, it's four to seven hundred bucks for a bag of wood or a truckload of wood chips, and that's that's a fair price for ramified wood chips. Um, you can get it from chipdrop.com and sign up for it. I would say people that don't get their wood chips fast enough from Chipdrop, they have not tipped enough. And that's what is the motivating factor for those drivers is the tip money. Probably, in my opinion, the best way to get wood chips is drive up when you're going down the road to a uh a truck that's doing the wood chips and say, I got 50 bucks cash, I'll give this to you if you bring it over to my house, and they will almost always do it.

SPEAKER_01 17:09

Yeah, and then that and accessibility. They need a good, easy place to drop it off where you know they're not gonna get stuck, they can easily get in and out, it's easy to find. That's that's my issue, is I don't have a spot where they can easily get to.

SPEAKER_00 17:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:20

And so then, you know, it discourages them. So just making their life as easy as possible. That's kind of the goal is you need that mutual beneficial relationship. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:27

And this is, you know, probably again, this is the most common question that I get from previous clients is do I have to do this forever? You know, and I do a lot of designs. You know, I get probably 40 to 75 designs or whatever a year. And I would say 85% of them made up number, um, come back within a year and go, how long do I got a wood chip? How long do I got a wood chip? It's a question of labor, it's a question of finances, it's a question of the time and energy. However, like we were saying earlier, that input during that initial first couple years to build that soil is gonna prevent you from having to do way more work later. Not just weeding, but amending, fertilizing your soil, bringing in nutrients.

SPEAKER_01 18:11

You're essentially wanting to build a hundred years worth of lumber, you know, and tree growth in under a year. And so it it takes a lot to get it back to that stage because you know it would take 100, 200, 300 years, depending on your area of to heal. You know, just to come back and get all that life in. Because you need to think about you need to start with grasses and weeds are gonna be your first thing. Then you have to have some sort of shrubs come in, and then you have to have then little seedlings under like tree seedlings come in, and that takes a long time for all of that. And then that's just to get your first set of trees, right? And then you need those to start falling. So you're talking potentially hundreds of years, so you're you're just maximizing and speeding that up. Yep.

SPEAKER_00 18:50

And that's the gift of permaculture, is permaculture is doing in three to five years what nature would do in a hundred years. We're designing intelligently, and so in order to do the soil healing that nature does in a hundred years, we have to be proactive for two to three years on the front end. So let's talk about a few ways to have an alternative. If we don't want to do wood chips, which I do think people should do for a couple years, if we don't want to do wood chips, you know, there's a lot of ways that you can practically build that soil structure without having to do the wood chips or wean yourself off ever so slightly, you know. And so when I do a design myself for a client, I always recommend wood chips to start because it's usually the best and easiest starting point for them to get used to a system. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_01 19:39

Well, it's a good buffer. I mean, it's a good starting point and it's aesthetically pleasing. So, you know, it it helps, it helps. But then also you can, you know, wean yourself away from that. I mean, uh you're always going to be wood or check like not wood chipping, mulching essentially forever. Cycling your nutrients, yeah. But it's not always the same form. There's so many ways of doing that. You life doesn't grow in a bubble, and you need that constant cycling and changing of things. So it's just a different way of going about it. Totally. Yeah, and so what's your favorite way?

SPEAKER_00 20:10

My favorite way is chop and drop. And so when I design for somebody, I always include chop and drop things. However, chop and drop as a as a method invites or requires people to be involved in their system, it requires you to steward your system. And I intentionally put that in a design because I don't want people to be disconnected from their food forest. I don't like the idea of a zero maintenance food forest. That is not what we were created to do. We're created.

SPEAKER_01 20:39

It's not going to be a productive system either. Nope. So it's discouraging because if you're not, you know, inputting inputs, you're not going to get outputs. Correct.

SPEAKER_00 20:47

And so I like the chop and drop. My couple favorite ones here, you know. I mean, I love the Mexican sunflower, I love Napier grass, I love vetiver grass. But all of those things require you or invite you to chop and drop it once, twice, five times a year to keep it healthy.

SPEAKER_01 21:03

And that's labor that isn't very easily exchanged out for something. You know, chopping and dropping, you have to cut it down, you have to lay it down, maybe even chop it into smaller pieces. You can't really mechanize that too easily. You can't really, you know, hand that off to somebody. And if you hire landscapers, they're not going to want it to be. They're not going to do it.

SPEAKER_00 21:21

And again, for me, it's yes, it's more work, but it's way more benefit. And especially when it comes to like Napier grass and Mexican sunflower, I don't like them to get woody. If it gets woody, that's a flag of you didn't manage your system. You didn't chop and drop it in time. But if you've got, you know, the time to once a week go down and cut down one plant. It takes three to five minutes to cut down a Napier grass. It's so fast to cut it down, lay it on the ground, walk away before it gets woody, and you're good to go. Now, if you slack off and don't maintain your food forest for a year, it's get no fingers pointed.

SPEAKER_01 21:53

You don't want to, you don't want to see this year. I have done zero chop and drop on my Mexican sunflower. And for anybody who knows, that's Like the biggest thing in my uh food forest because I started with it and it's the easiest to propagate. Right. So I have every single row has like dozens of sunflower, and this year I haven't had any time to do it. Are you kind of failing your garden? Yeah, a little bit. But then you can reset. But you can reset, and you know, you're not gonna get as much benefit when it gets woody, but there are like it doesn't mean you failed. It doesn't mean that you can't come back from it. Because you'll just you need to be it's a lot more work because it's you know harder, you know, sticks and stuff. Chipping it. Well, I mean, some chippers don't like it. I don't have a chipper that can effectively do it.

SPEAKER_00 22:33

So I have to Now that it's dry at a little chips.

SPEAKER_01 22:35

Now that it's dry at a will, the freeze is gonna make resetting it a lot easier. But then you can lay them down and it it does kind of work like a mulch in a way. It prevents the sun from you know baking it. Yep. You're gonna need to encourage your mycorrhizal fungi to be there. It's one of those things that we don't really have a lot of enzymes and stuff to break down woody Mexican sunflower. It's gonna be there for like three or four years.

SPEAKER_00 22:56

Or use bioeg and it'll be gone in like six months. Well, spray the top of it.

SPEAKER_01 23:01

It took a while for the right mycorrhizal fungi and bacteria to break it down though. Like initially, it's there it had zero breakdown for like the first five years. Because it just didn't have the right end.

SPEAKER_00 23:11

Have you ever tried like chopping and dropping it and then using the bioeg spray on top? I haven't.

SPEAKER_01 23:16

I need to try that. Give it a shot. I mean, they're they're now they're now breaking down the woody stuff, but right, but it you know, you have to then lay them down and maybe put you know other kinds of mulch on top of it. It's shocking how much faster it'll be. But see if at least here in Florida, with the green stuff, if you if you lay down the green stuff, it can be gone in two weeks. Oh, yeah. Or less.

SPEAKER_00 23:34

Yep, because of the moisture. So for people that don't want to chop and drop, they're you know, they're kind of like, you know what, I don't have time for that. There's other ways to build that biomass other than just the chop and drop or wood chipping. So, what's one of your next favorite ones other than chop and dropping?

SPEAKER_01 23:50

I mean, you can always do cover crops. Cover crops are a good way. Um, that's more of a passive, I would say, without implementing other methods. Um, it's basically just making sure you don't you get the weeds you want versus the weeds you don't want. Yeah. Because either way, you're gonna have if you're not extensively throwing down wood chips, constantly uh, you know, putting more in, then you're gonna have stuff grow. Life's gonna find a way, and you need to fill the space. So if you want, if you don't mind weeds, weeds are gonna come up and they'll fill the space. They may cause a few problems with you know competing with your fruit trees and stuff, depending on the weeds. Um, but that doesn't mean they're a bad thing. But if you don't want those, plant something there. Oh, yeah. So whether that's a shrub that you're chopping dropping, or whether that's you know, something like uh you know, a daikon radish or I like those just because they're multi-purpose. Or you got clovers, you know, up north, the clover's a good one, but just something that's gonna fill the space and then it's gonna be annual, so then it's gonna die back and it's gonna naturally provide that. Yeah, and you may need to come back with like a weed eater or something like that to you know trim them up, just clean it up occasionally or chickens or cows or horses. You're getting you're getting ahead of them.

SPEAKER_00 24:54

You're getting ahead of the stuff. So I like with a cover crop, I love Hancock Seed Company. They've got some really good pasture mixes. If you don't have Hancock Seed Company, you know, on your list, um, even Tractor Supply has deer food plot mixes. I think it's called seven card stud or something. And it's got diakin, it's got purple top turnip, it's got rapeseed, it's got wheat, it's got rye, it's got clover. And I'll just go grab a$10,$20 bag of that stuff and just start throwing it around, lightly rake it in, and whatever comes up, comes up. I when I cover crop, I like the more species the better, because on some properties, clover may not do well, but diakin may kick butt, or vice versa, you know. So I like those mixes that have a lot into it.

SPEAKER_01 25:38

Yeah, I wouldn't I would never pick just one variety. No, the more and you and you can either buy a mixed bag or you can make your own mixed bag. Yep. I mean, a lot of these seed places, it's cheaper just to buy the one kind of seed. And if you're doing a decent sized area, then it's like, okay, we'll just buy a 10 or 20-pound bag of daikon, get a 10, 20-pound bag of clover, and just combine them all. And that's a that's a little bit of way to kind of squeeze a little bit extra out.

SPEAKER_00 26:00

Chicory has been one of my new favorites because the leaves are edible. The root you can dry and make coffee out of. The flowers are like a bluish color, really pretty, and they pretty much grow anywhere. Like the side of the road, you know, they'll basically grow. So, aside from the cover cropping, I would say I would also consider wildflowers like a cover crop. And that's to me is also a good option. It's not an edible for humans necessarily, but great for wildlife, you know. And so a lot of times if people are like, you know what, I'm done. I don't want to do the wood chipping anymore. I tried it, it's not for me. I'll say, great, let's go ahead and low-till it or rake it by hand, you know, with a garden rake and then put in some wildflower seed, cover it up, and whatever grows, grows. It's not gonna be neat and organized and clean. It's gonna look like a wildflower prairie, but it is gonna be beautiful. It's gonna be a pollinator, it's gonna be medicinal, it's gonna provide natural habitat for quail, for bees, for butterflies, for moss, for small rodents, for whatever. My probably favorite company when I was in the Midwest was called Prairie Moon Nursery. What I liked about them is you can kind of go on their website and say, I'm full sun, I want it this high. You can add in the criteria and it gives you the seed mix that you should grow. And I love that. Um, American Meadows is a good one for like the southern, and you can kind of tailor it for your state. I think wildflower mixes are an excellent idea. They can get a little unkept after a while and swimming.

SPEAKER_01 27:25

Especially after them. Yeah, especially after they're done flowering too. They can look really weedy. Yep. I will say I like the wildflowers because if you do have an occasional weed and you don't really have the time to see it constantly, yeah. It does hide the weeds a lot better because those weeds are just growing in just like a meadow. I mean, you're not going to have only wildflowers in there. So, you know, the occasional weed, and let's be honest here, and people are gonna be, you know, maybe after me about this. Weeds are wildflowers. I don't know what weeds are wildflowers, you just don't like them.

SPEAKER_00 27:53

And that's all it's a plant in the wrong spot for you.

SPEAKER_01 27:55

Yeah, you know, it's every single plant is a weed if you don't like it.

SPEAKER_00 28:00

Oh, yeah. My favorite plant in the Midwest, dandelion. People are like trying to get dandelion out of their yard, and I'm like, I want all the greens, I want all the flowers, I want all the roots, I'm tincturing free snacks, I'm eating it, I'm putting the flowers on salads. And it and here, Biden's Alba, you know, good old Spanish needle. Like every part of the super medicinal. Oh my gosh, it's amazing. I'm not hating on the weeds. I love me some good weeds. Not that kind of weeds, but weed.

SPEAKER_01 28:24

Exactly. I like flower, wildflower weeds. I mean, depending on where you live, that's a weed too. That is a weed too, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:30

Exactly. And the nice thing with cover crops or wildflowers, there's benefit for human, there's benefit for the soil, there's benefit for nature, and potentially benefit for livestock as well.

SPEAKER_01 28:42

You know, absolutely, absolutely. And then, yeah, getting into livestock, that's a good way to kind of cycle that nutrients if you have, you know, the wildflower mix. Certain wildflowers aren't edible for things, but you could then rotate, you know, something like ducks or chickens or cows or whatever. Yep. Um, I love ducks personally, just because they will trample everything. I know you don't like them because they're messy, yeah, but they don't tear up your gardens as much and you can just kind of run them through. Yeah, alternatively, you know, cattle. If you you know have you know just one or two cows that you have for the family, just to have your occasional beef rotating them through is a good way. And chickens. And chickens. And so even though they're technically providing manure, which we usually think more as a fertilizer, essentially every single type of wood chips, mulches, everything that we're talking about today is the exact same process, just a different route to get there.

SPEAKER_00 29:33

Yeah, you know, same thing nature's doing, we're just doing it a little faster.

SPEAKER_01 29:37

Well, a little faster and just a different way. I mean, their their manure is just a you know digested you know plant fibers. So it's the same thing as what we're doing. We're just feeding it to enzymes in their gut rather than enzymes in their soil. I mean, it's it's it's it's all the same. So it's it's just running those through, you can get your, you know, it's essentially mowing.

SPEAKER_00 29:56

Yep. Oh, it exactly. And that's I had somebody, my neighbor actually a couple weeks back was like, Um, you know, do you have a compost pile? I've I feel like you should have a compost pile. And I was like, Yeah, I do. It's my chickens. Yeah because I take all the weeds, I take vegetable scraps, I take whatever, and it all goes into the chicken coops.

SPEAKER_01 30:11

And I mean, it's the same thing, but you can eat it at the end.

SPEAKER_00 30:14

You can eat it. They turn it magically into eggs, you know, and it's like these animals are composting machines, and that accomplishes the same goal as the wood chips. And this is what we're kind of saying all the way through this podcast is the goal is not wood chips. The goal is cycling your nutrients, it's chopping and dropping, it's animals eating and foraging, it's making whatever was above the soil go back into the soil. Come back up, go back down.

SPEAKER_01 30:40

In in nature, you're never having just one process work at the at once, whether that's your fungi, whether that's bacteria, whether that's you know, worms, whether that's animals. All of those things are all providing the exact same thing. Cycle the nutrients. And so, yeah, if you don't want a wood chip anymore and you don't mind it being a little weedy, cool. You can just let the weeds grow, have some chickens come through later, and then just you know, take a weed eater and snip back anything that you don't like. Exactly. Or you can do like what Chris does run the chickens through and throw seed behind them and you know, let that compost sprout up new things. Yep. There's so many ways to do it. And and if you can't have animals because you live in somewhere, it is okay to mow. Mowing mowing is just mowing's the same thing, it's just using a machine versus an animal.

SPEAKER_00 31:21

And honestly, a mower for me is like an adult go-kart. I just I could literally just put on audiobooks all day long and just sit on the mower. I hate weed whacking, but sitting on the mower, I love it. And essentially, mowing is chop and drop. I'm chopping it, I'm dropping it where it is. I never bag up leaves or sticks or grass and put it in a bag and send it to the road. Oh, no, no, no, no. I want those nutrients going back down into my soil, you know. And so, again, for people that are going, do I have to wood chip forever? No. But what you are gonna be doing forever is you are gonna be cycling your nutrients. You're taking what's above the ground, you're putting it back into the soil, which comes back up as a seed, and then you're chopping it and bringing it back into the soil. And that's a forever process.

SPEAKER_01 32:04

And if you really want to maximize it, you can do all of these at the same time. All of them at the same time. You start with your wood chips, that's your core that gets you started, it gets your plants off on a good foot. Then you have your chop and drop. You occasionally, you know, a couple times a year, you chop, you drop it. You have your wildflowers growing alongside your chop and drop, or or your cover crops, either way. And then occasionally you just roll your animals through. And then anything they don't like to eat, then you come back through with a mower and just mow those things. That way you encourage, you know, things that they want to eat because that is the goal. And you just keep cycling that one after the other. Yeah, you can bring these all together.

SPEAKER_00 32:37

And somebody that does that, I feel like that is a connected person to their system. That's somebody that is stewarding their system, and that is the goal of a food forest or a garden is to be a steward and be connected. We were created, I believe, to be in the garden, um, capital G garden, and connected to creation and to the creator as a steward of that process. And so somebody that's connected, helping cycle those nutrients, that that is the invitation we get to, you know, be a part of. That's the process and the system we get to be a part of.

SPEAKER_01 33:10

And that's just encouraging the system to also be beneficial to you as well. The more inputs that you are willing to put in, that doesn't mean necessarily work, that doesn't necessarily mean money, but just being a part of your system makes it more beneficial for you.

SPEAKER_00 33:22

Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, my coffee is almost finished. So I want to say thanks for tuning in, for listening. If you want to take a couple seconds, do the social media thing for us. It helps you find a way back, but it also helps other people get connected to the right content. So thanks so much.

SPEAKER_01 33:39

The follows, the likes, the all that stuff. All the stuff.

SPEAKER_00 33:42

Thanks again. We will see you in the next one.

SPEAKER_01 33:44

Later.